The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Social bookmarking websites allow users to save and tag URLs for future reference. An example of a social bookmarking website is the site “http://del.icio.us.” With this type of site, a user can search on tags to locate bookmarks on a particular topic of interest. Another way users find bookmarks on these sites is by browsing the URLs that have been bookmarked the most by other users. For example, the above-referenced site has a URL ending in “popular/” that provides access to the most popular bookmarked URLs.
HTTP traffic monitoring systems are available from vendors such as Oakley Networks, AdventNet and Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif. (Cisco Netflow). These products for security operations or for network operations and are not used for general purpose social bookmarking. HTTP traffic monitoring systems do not dynamically index the content of pages and associate tags with pages.
The Google search engine system has provided information on search patterns and trends in a facility known as “zeitgeist” functionality, as described in the file “zeitgeist.html” in the folder “/press” of the domain “google.com” on the World Wide Web.